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From The New York Times:

Adam Horovitz, a Beastie Boy in Middle Age
By Melena Ryzik

March 20, 2015

Adam Horovitz in Noah Baumbach’s film “While We’re Young.”Credit...Jon Pack/A24

Longtime fans of the Beastie Boys could be forgiven for imagining that the rappers would be perennially young, forever New York’s impish hometown heroes, ollieing past authority on their way to after-hours fun.

In truth, Adam Horovitz, 48 and better known as Ad-Rock, hasn’t set foot on a skateboard in a decade. “It’s way too much work,” he said. He doesn’t rage the way he did in the old days, either. "I'm certainly not going to take ecstasy and hit the club and listen to whatever, like, electronic dance music hit," he said. "I got no business going to a club. I'm a terrible dancer. I got a bad back."

All of this made him, in some ways, perfect for the part of an early-to-bed, stay-at-home, sweater-wearing New York dad in Noah Baumbach’s new movie, "While We're Young." The art-filled apartment, the casually mussed gray hair, the Wilco collection — “I’m pretty much that person,” Mr. Horovitz said. “Except for the Wilco CD.”

The comedy, which opens March 27, stars Ben Stiller as a stalled midcareer documentary filmmaker, with Naomi Watts as his film producer wife. Their personal and professional lives are turned upside down when they meet a young Brooklyn couple, played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried, who bicycle everywhere, make artisanal avocado ice cream, and prefer VHS tapes and typewriters to digital files.

Mr. Horovitz plays the friend who brings Mr. Stiller’s character, Josh, back to reality. “You’re an old man, with a hat,” he admonishes, when Josh takes to wearing a fedora.

Adam Horovitz in Madison Square Park.Credit...Jessica Lehrman for The New York Times

He may not be playing against type, but for Mr. Horovitz, making the movie was a stretch — a welcome one. With the Beastie Boys on indefinite hiatus after the 2012 death of Adam Yauch, a.k.a. MCA, Mr. Horovitz has been casting about for a new creative role, he said over coffee recently. “It’s weird when you have an identity for so long, that that’s who you are,” he said of his 30-year reign as Ad-Rock. Post-Beastie, “I haven’t figured out what that identity is.”

With Mike Diamond (Mike D), he is working on a Beasties memoir — but it won’t be ready anytime soon. “As a band, we always took a really long time to make records, so unfortunately, we got into that habit of, like, ‘we’ll work on it tomorrow,’ “ Mr. Horovitz said. He had acted in small films in the ’80s and early ’90s, and he and Mr. Baumbach are friends, introduced years ago through Mr. Horovitz’s sister Rachael, a film producer. So when Mr. Baumbach approached him with the role, “I feel like he did me a big favor,” Mr. Horovitz said.

Mr. Baumbach had long thought about casting him. “I love Adam’s voice, I love his countenance — there’s something very dry about him,” he said. Earlier he’d considered him for “Greenberg,” another film starring Mr. Stiller. All three grew up in New York, the children of artistic parents. “There’s a sensibility that we all connect to,” Mr. Baumbach said, and shared cultural references. (Cookie Puss, a trippy Carvel ice cream cake that wound its way into the Beastie Boys debut single, looms large.) All are parents — Mr. Horovitz has a young son — and Mr. Baumbach, 45, was a longtime Beasties fan.

But, he said, “Probably not until I was cutting the movie did I sort of look at it and think: There’s definitely an added poignancy to seeing Ad-Rock in middle age, with a baby. It’s certainly a reminder to me that I’m not 25 anymore.”

Writing the film was a way to work through those universal anxieties about aging and maturity, Mr. Baumbach said. It’s about “our relationship to our own childhoods as we become parents or don’t become parents,” he said, “and the appropriation of the culture” that has sped up in the digital era, as generation gaps have shrunk. The movie opens with a lullaby version of David Bowie’s “Golden Years.”

Mr. Horovitz is a presence on Twitter and Instagram, but mostly, he said: “I don't get caught up in what the kids are doing today. I don't really care.” (He was put off by a techno track playing at the cafe during the interview. “Every song on the radio has this,” he complained of the breakbeat, then added, grinning, “I say that as if I listen to the radio.”)

He took his role in “While We're Young” seriously, calling on his best friend, Nadia Dajani, an actress he has known since childhood, to help prepare. “I was definitely nervous, because I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. His earlier acting career foundered when he couldn’t ace auditions. “I went in for the Doors movie, with Oliver Stone,” Mr. Horovitz recalled. “I was definitely stoned, and as I walked in I looked at him and I was like, ‘You’re not going to cast me in this movie, right?’ He’s like, ‘No, I don’t think so.’”

Mr. Horovitz is not expecting agents to come calling now, but he would like to work on soundtracks, as he did last year, for the baseball documentary, “No No,” about the pitcher Dock Ellis. He’s a devoted softball player himself — for 10 years he’s run a friendly park league with his wife, the singer Kathleen Hanna, and downtown performers like Murray Hill and Bridget Everett, the bawdy cabaret singer. Mr. Horovitz plays bass in her band. “I call him ‘Adam what-are-we-wearing Horovitz,’ because he always wants to do something crazy,” she said. (A wrestling singlet has been discussed.)

Ms. Everett was surprised at first that Mr. Horovitz, a rock ‘n’ roll hall of famer, wanted to join her small act, but she discovered that they had the same sensibility; he also helped produce her forthcoming Comedy Central special, and cameoed on “Inside Amy Schumer.” “He can do exactly what he wants to do, and that’s what he’s doing,” Ms. Everett said.

Mr. Horovitz seconded this: “I don’t really have long days very often,” he said. “It’s fantastic.” He makes music daily, on his laptop, but rarely raps. “It’s depressing,” he said. Then he brightened. “I’ll do it later, I think,” he said. “I’ll be, like, the oldest rapper alive.”

For fans worried that Mr. Horovitz is already AARP-ready, or has lost his youthful comedic snap, fear not. He can still go on an extended riff about mystery novels written by cats.

Beyond the film, what else is he excited about? “I’ve got a sandwich,” he said, a specialty pastrami banh mi, sold for charity at the New York shop Num Pang. “Some people — your Jay Zs, your Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs, your Master Ps — they have sneakers, clothing lines,” Mr. Horovitz said. “Who gets a sandwich? Not that many people. The Count of Monte Cristo! So I’m part of a lineage, and I feel very proud of it.”